We may see purple-maned horses

but they don't occur naturally

Golden Diamonds Ranch manages to send shock waves through the region here every other week. Be it through their attitudes towards customers in the restaurant, or for their bloated horses, they don’t miss an opportunity to become the subject of ridicule around our stable. This week was not different. Jake and Hunter were filling up our barrel, while Jake said: “I just drove by Golden Diamonds and that purple-maned stare was right next to the fence.” Hunter did not know what a “stare” was, but Jake soon gave him the answer: “There’s some sort of Brazilian non-profit that’s showcasing that poor animal there. She obviously used to be a beautiful mare, but those insane Brazilians thought she ‘identified as a stallion’ and had a dick appended to her. Since, they cut her manes short and painted them purple.”

The purple-maned horse at Golden Diamonds. AI generated image.

I felt for the animal, even though I didn’t get to see her. “No way she had agreed to that being done to her, was my first reaction.” Hunter raised a different question, though: “Who on earth would ever pay for such butchery?”

As it turned out, the Brazilian nonprofit O Cavalo Roxo had various sources of funding. Yes, they occasionally received ten dollar donations from inner city left-wingers who had never seen a horse up close. However, like most non-profits, they would not survive on small donations alone. Last year, they had received one million-dollar mega-check, which takes a nonprofit much further in Brazil than in the United States. That check came from USAID. Apparently, it is in the national interest of the United States to have trans surgical experiments on horses in Brazil. Or is it?

Since the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has analyzed and published some of USAID’s grant payments, it has come under a great deal of scrutiny. I will refrain from presenting a list of USAID’s engagements, as those have been documented well by others. However, just citing a few of their grants should raise eyebrows. For instance, USAID granted approximately

• $2 million to a nonprofit that promotes gender reassignment surgeries in Guatemala,

• $4.5 million to combat “disinformation” in Central Asia,

• $6 million for “social inclusion of LGBTQI+ people” for countries around the world

• $11 million to improve the effectiveness of the efforts to promote DEI in Nepal

• $1 million to fund “serial passage” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

and maybe the best of them all,

• $10 million to run transgender experiments on rats and mice.

The disclosure of said activities sponsored by USAID has led to drastic cuts by the recently inaugurated government. Democratic politicians soon started to cry wolf, arguing that the incumbent administration was cutting the funding for “life-saving aid for the poorest on the planet.” While they may be playing a political game, I would forgive them if they truly believed that making cuts to USAID eliminates foreign aid. The phonology of the name surely suggests that. Yet USAID was never meant to be an organization that provides aid and expects nothing in return.

In fact, USAID does not abbreviate to “US aid.” The United States Agency for International Development was created by executive order in 1961 by president John F. Kennedy as an instrument of statecraft. It was to become a government agency that was to fulfill the task of bolstering US foreign policy by financially supporting societal trends friendly to the US in foreign countries. The premise of having an agency that uplifts the image of the United States abroad can definitely be defended, since it lowers the probability that foreign nations become hostile regimes, as has happened in Venezuela. It is fair to say that USAID may have prevented several other nations from ending up in a situation similar to Venezuela’s.

The way in which USAID’s strategic evaluation of support for foreign actors worked, can be summarized as follows: at first, a so-called baseline assessment was carried out, wherein societal groups and trends in the target country were classified as “favorable” or “disfavorable” to US interests. Based on that assessment’s outcome, USAID stepped in to support those trends deemed favorable. Using its giant annual budget (about $50 billion in 2024), it then massively boosted favorable groups and trends by funding non-profits of all sorts, that could interface with virtually all of the target country’s societal pillars, such as the press, academia, industry, politicians, cultural icons, or religious leaders. The step to make such a massive investment into a target country is called capacity building.

Given USAID’s capability and proven track record to capacity build US-friendly foreign infrastructure abroad, some still argue today that any of the recently published questionable programmes actually do serve the national interest. However, the piece overlooked in that argument is that it starts out from the premise that USAID’s leadership both has the intention and the sound judgment to select the right causes. Unfortunately, exactly at that point, the US foreign policy establishment has increasingly derailed over the course of the past decade. Let’s have a look at each of these topics and analyze how the situation got where it is.

Back in 2016, both the election of Donald Trump and the outcome of the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union sent shockwaves through the ranks of those who consider themselves the “foreign policy establishment.” Based on these two events, the leadership at the State Department and USAID decided that similar events needed to be avoided in the future. Why exactly is less clear, since President Trump’s statements show that he has the country’s best interests at heart, much more so than many “left-wing” politicians who think that the entire West should abolish itself. Likewise, a decade after Brexit, the relationship between the UK and the US has not weakened a bit, which proves that bilateral relationships can be as strong, if not stronger, than relationships with a bloc of nations. Brexit has not proven to be a national security risk for the US in any way.

That notwithstanding, the US foreign policy establishment decided that “populism” was the new enemy of the state. It even went as far as to redirect resources from terrorism prevention to fight populism. Censorship programmes, like the ones infamously run by the now-defunct Global Engagement Center, find their origins in 2016 workstreams titled CT2CP (counter-terrorism to counter-populism). Since the baseline assessment was that populism was the unwanted societal trend, USAID then started to capacity build resources both to counter populism, as well as to boost its opponents. USAID has poured large sums into nonprofits that nudge foreign countries to censor their citizens, where it was understood that the censorship should only apply to the populists. Likewise, it has massively bolstered resources for groups deemed “good to counter populism,” which invariably resort under the umbrella of “extreme left-wing” activism, such as climate activists, LGBT and specifically transgender activists, as well as socialist political action groups who push “multiculturalism.” Since populist politicians tend to appeal to the national cultural pride, those in favour of massive immigration and a “transformation to a multicultural society” were seen as US allies. It is barely a hyperbole to state that USAID’s massive societal nudging is the direct reason why we have ended up with the despicable state of affairs in Britain, Brazil and the European Union, where ordinary citizens are being arrested for mere opinions.

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Since we understand that this is USAID’s modus operandi, the facts that it sponsored projects to “counter disinformation,” or promote transgender lunacy, start to fit together. However, all of that derives from the fatally flawed baseline assessment that those are activities that promote the US national interest. Maybe, the best example to underscore that statement is Brazil. The 2022 presidential elections there ran between the populist incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, and his “left”-wing opponent Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Based on the baseline assessment that populism needed to be defeated, USAID funneled millions into Brazilian nonprofits that advocated for speech restrictions, transgender protections, and instruction classes for judges to make more “inclusive” (read: biased) decisions. In this case, though, the State Department also acted directly to support Brazil in the rollout of electronic voting machines. In 2021, they went as far as to guarantee Brazil supply of superconductors, notably at the time of a global (and domestic) chip shortage. Electronic voting was indeed rolled out in the country, without paper back-up. The result of the elections was that Bolsonaro’s party won the local elections in a majority of states, including the most populous one, yet Lula’s charisma won him the presidency. Since, Brazil has devolved into a nightmare state, where citizens can be arrested for unwarranted opinions in proceedings presided by a Supreme Court “justice” who sometimes acts as prosecutor, police, victim and judge in the same trial. While antithetic to American principles of the course of justice and freedom of expression, one could still argue that that can be in the national interest. However, in the 2022 election, Bolsonaro was the candidate who advocated for a strong alliance with the US, as well as for American principles like free markets and free speech. Lula, on the contrary, vowed and still vows for commitment to the Brics, forges alliances with China and continues to state that he “dreams to wake up in a dedollarized world.” How can support for such a candidate be in the US’s national interest?

Brazilian President Lula da Silva. Picture by Ricardo Stuckert, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

In the case of CT2CP, the baseline assessment could not be more wrong and could only be advocated for by moderately intelligent coastal blob snobs in the “foreign policy establishment.” However, even in case the baseline assessment is correct, one still has to be mindful of the means to implement it with. If those means are immoral themselves, the desired effect may be attained in the short term, but it is almost one hundred percent certain to backfire in the mid to long term. Several examples come to mind. When Afghanistan had a Soviet-aligned government, the baseline assessment was that regime change was needed. The jihadi warrior clan of Mujahedeen were identified as aligned to US interests and funded. In the short term, yes, they succeeded to capture the country and turn it away from the Soviet Union. But we all know what happened afterwards. They turned the country into an islamist nightmare where women were hanged from goalposts and where terrorism was openly supported. The latter then spurred another US intervention, an occupation that lasted twenty years to end in … the same islamists to regain power. Islamism inherently despises Western society and is ready to fight to death. It is diametrically opposed to Western principles and should never be chosen as an ally, no matter the end goal.

Certain means should never be chosen as the path to achieve goals, even noble ones. USAID has sponsored the causes of censorship and imprisonment of political opponents abroad. Do we really think that citizens in countries who used to abide by the American principle of free speech, will be US allies when they see their peers being arrested for posting a meme? USAID has sponsored support for transgender surgeries in Guatemala. I can’t wait to hear first hand stories from parents whose children have been taken away and subjected to genital butchery. It will definitely turn them into steadfast allies if they learn that USAID was behind that. Sure. Likewise, USAID has been nudging European societies to embrace “multiculturalism” by massively importing immigrants from Middle Eastern Countries, among whom many jihadis. Do we think that Europeans who used to live in quaint communities will be allied to the US when they now have jihadis ploughing into their Christmas markets?

Support for either the jihadi or woke death cults is a direct road to self-ruin. Yet exactly that is what the US “foreign policy establishment” seems to have been doing. How could they have been so misguided, one begs to ask? The reason might be straightforward: to build a competent national security establishment, competent people need to be hired. Presently, the Director General of the National Security Agency (NSA) makes $212,823. I trust that at least some of Wild Horse Wisdom’s readers make more, which means that they make more than every single NSA employee. By underpaying the market, we cannot create a competent security establishment. Instead, we get a collection of moderately skilled individuals who would not pass the bar elsewhere and who think that they can stand out by mentioning their freshly invented set of pronouns in the weekly group meeting and by boasting how many “trans children” they have. The way out is to reduce the number of employees, while increasing the quality of the new hires. That requires a competitive compensation.

Once upon a time, US foreign policy used to be driven by noble principles. However, it has gradually degraded into a power grab devoid of morals in which everything goes as long as it serves the mission. That still worked as long as the mission itself made sense, but in the last ten years, those who set the mission targets have lost their senses too. A drastic change of course is needed, but as I argued before, we are past peak bias and we will see that unfold shortly. It will be a return to principle, reason, spirituality and national pride, rather than undue “pride” for what others do under the blankets.

Our Tempest will grow up to be a good horse. I won’t need to ask his “gender identity” for that. Picture by Jan Laugesen.

I am still upset by what I learnt about the poor purple-haired mare at Golden Diamonds. I feel for her and I can’t help but being angry at those who did it to her, even though I never met them. One thing I know for sure, though, is that it will never happen here. I’ve had several foals and I will have a few more. All of them have grown up to be good mares and stallions. None of them has ever identified as a mallion or as a stare. The reason for that is simple: the universe knows to put us horses on the planet in the right body. Let me share one more secret: it knows to do that for humans too. The difference between us horses and humans is that we can’t be talked into what we are not.